Sunday, June 27, 2010

So this weekend the G20 rolled into Toronto. Our usually peaceful city got a little bit crazy.

On Saturday, my roommate and I headed out to MEC to pick up a few things, but had heard a protest parade was headed near our neighbourhood so we thought we'd check it out on the way there. We expected to see a parade of people with a few cops interspersed in-between. What we found was much more insane.

We were at the corner of Spadina and Richmond trying to see the protest that was a block north of us at Spadina and Queen. We were met by police officers trying to keep us bystanders back from the protest. It started off with one single line of officers, but it quickly escalated into about 100 cops just around a bunch of people trying to see what was going on.

While we weren't actually in the protest, it was pretty intense at times. Especially when all the cops near us started to put their gas masks on and aim gas grenade guns in our direction.

I snapped a lot of pics over the hour and a half I was standing there. Here's a few of them:

(Sorry about the quality, I was ill prepared and only had my iPhone camera)

Thankfully nothing happened where we were. Too bad the same couldn't be said for the rest of the city. Windows were smashed in buildings all over the city. Police cars were set on fire. Other crazy shit went down. Thankfully no one was really hurt.

If you want to see the rest of my photos from saturday you can see the set here.

Also, on sunday there was another big to-do at Queen and Spadina where cops held a bunch of people in the middle of the road for some unknown reason. A lot of those people were just bystanders as well. I was watching the tweets from a friend of mine trapped in the middle of it. It seemed very eerie.

Now the G20 is done and hopefully my city gets back to normal. It was way too strange seeing the Toronro like this.